Special Announcement: Can You Escape the Room?

Hi everyone. I (Mike Ritchie, Director of Marketing) have a non-traditional (by our standards) post for you today…it’s really more of an announcement. We do our best here to keep our content interesting and not specific to our products – hopefully you agree, and hopefully that’s bought me the opportunity to take some of your time for what is an announcement about a product (a very cool product), 'Escape the Room: Mystery at the Stargazer's Manor', and some great free content we'll be sharing to go with that product.

This month we are releasing a first of its kind board game version of what many call an ‘Escape Game’, or ‘Escape the Room Game’. Escape is a trend that’s really catching on in America right now. A group of people go to a venue, get locked in a room, and have to find clues and solve a series of puzzles in order to escape. This kind of entertainment is everywhere - even here in Alexandria, VA, a few minutes from ThinkFun headquarters, there's an Escape Room. The ThinkFun team is headed there on Thursday, March 3rd, to test it out!

The most interesting Escape Room I’ve heard about so far is one that has a zombie. Yes, a zombie. You don’t just have to deal with the pressure of escaping by solving puzzles, you also have a zombie in the room with you. I think it's chained to the wall, with its chain being let out a foot every couple of minutes. And, when you run out of time….

Scary stuff aside, the reason I wanted to make this announcement is because of the amazing content our team, along with some outside consultants, is creating to support the launch of our new game; ‘Escape the Room: Mystery at the Stargazer’s Manor’. This game has a few important characters that I'll take a minute to fill you in on…the Astronomer, the Astronomer’s Wife, and the Caretaker.

The Astronomer and his Wife lived happily in their manor for many years, until one day…something terrible happened. The once beautiful old house turned decrepit, and strange noises could be heard coming from it at night. In the story of the game you, the host, are the Caretaker, who was let go after the mysterious tragedy. Full of concern for your former employer and old friend, you gather up some of your friends from the town and head up to Stargazer’s Manor to solve the mystery.

We would love for people to have fun with the story behind the game, and the characters specifically. That’s why we’re creating a whole bunch of exclusive content, for free, to help people connect with that story and those characters. Regular readers of this blog will be familiar with our weekly brainteasers. We’ve created customized brainteasers, where you can solve puzzles about the Astronomer and his Wife, and engage with the storyline. We'll also have Twitter accounts for these characters, where they'll be interacting with each other and anyone else who wants to join the fun.

And, for the first time in ThinkFun’s history, we've created animated videos to tell the story of our game. They're very cool, and have been a lot of fun to make.

Like I said, this will all be free - we just want you to enjoy the content and the story. That being said, if you would like to buy the game, you won’t get any arguments from me!

If you want to be the first to know about the release of our Escape the Room: Mystery at the Stargazer's Manor brainteasers and animated videos (everything to be released throughout March), you can subscribe by clicking on the box in the bottom right of this window. We promise you won’t receive any emails about any other products – you will only hear about this upcoming content, along with any future Escape the Room information we think you’d want to know about (special offers, other versions, etc.). If you want emails about everything, scroll up and subscribe to the blog – if you’re already a blog subscriber, you have to subscribe separately to get the Escape the Room emails. We apologize if that's inconvenient, but we don't want to fill up anyone's inbox more than they'd like, and not all of our existing subscribers necessarily want emails about this content.